Elevator action

Here's how the elevator sequence is looking. There are still issues that need to be resolved - the green cast and breaking apart of the opening shot and then the plastic feel of the start of the elevator, but it's getting closer..

Surveyors almost done

Happy Easter, all! There hasn't been much activity on the blog recently because the nature of the latest work isn't so interesting on a day to day level. It's been mostly color correcting and minor graphic touchups as shown in the stills below. Some of the spots that didn't have boxes got them added in and in certain shots, the set ended and it was possible to see the lights of the set. Those each got their small touchups.

The last shot is interesting because as a wide view, it was feeling very stagnant at such a removed distance from the characters. To inject some life in it, I first filtered shadows into the boxes that surround the surveyors so that the eye is drawn in towards them (it was too difficult to get this type of lighting on the set during shooting with the equipment we had), then I zoomed the camera back even further and added fake boxes around the left, right and top sides so that we can slowly zoom in towards them. It's not a very noticeable effect, but it does breathe life into this shot. The final detail was to create some depth by means of some slightly out of focus foreground boxes that move past the background at a slightly different perspective. That should fool the eye into not realizing too quickly that we're essentially just moving in towards a flat image..

And so, Surveyors is about 80% done at this point. Just need to rework the end elevator sequence and a nice cg shot to introduce moving into the second chamber..

Also, if you haven't been to the blog lately, you might want to take a look at two blog entries back where the latest trailer is posted (or click here). It incorporates a lot of the new footage and starts to get to the right vibe. It isn't the final trailer by any means. I'm starting to envision the next one as being even a little bit more offbeat and intriguing..

(click the photos for a larger view)



(no audio on this video, by the way..)

Surveyors revised edit

Hi all - I've been off the radar for a few weeks mostly due to moving back from Montreal. It's a bit of a pain to move all the machinery around, but it doesn't happen too often. Now that it's back up, I'm digging into the last major issue which is the Surveyors short. Below is the latest edit which is looking reasonably good (except some uneveness at the end). This is the footage straight from the camera. Each shot has since then been color corrected and filtered - that version is coming in another day or two after a bit more cleanup.